Frank Luntz aired clips from a focus group on Hannity Wednesday night (5/26/10) that supposedly probed the opinions about Sean Hannity. And surprise, surprise, they were almost all positive. Even the so-called negative responses were pretty darned mild. Recalling how Luntz tried to pull the wool over our eyes with a previous group “evenly split between McCain and Obama voters” – which did not represent the 2008 American electorate – I was immediately curious to know who Luntz included in this group. Sure enough, he never said, other than to describe the respondents as “average Americans” in Arizona. Yeah, right. Average Americans who watch Fox News, maybe, or Average Americans who watch or listen to Hannity more than three times a week.

“Let’s see what average Americans think of you and what you do on television,” Luntz said by way of introduction. He played a few snippets of comments. According to Luntz, only two of the 23 people in the group said anything negative about Hannity. What were these “negative” comments? One woman said he talked a lot. A man said he was extremely conservative. Someone said, “I think that he’s all talk and nothing happens. It’s very easy to talk and get nothing done.” You don’t have to be a demographics expert to suspect that this Hannity love fest had been pre-ordained by a cherry-picking selection process.

Luntz said he did the group because “I want to understand how people feel about the hosts on Fox News. I do more of these focus groups for you than anybody else. “ So that’s why we saw opinions about Hannity, only? Hannity didn’t ask whether Luntz had sought out attitudes toward other hosts.

In the face of all that praise, Hannity played it modest. “I read as many emails that people send me as I possibly can. And I gotta tell you something. I learn. I try to improve. If I think the criticism’s valid, I try to improve. I really do listen to it. So I take it to heart and that’s hard to do, to hear things about yourself.”

So, for the sake of Hannity’s self-improvement efforts, please feel free to drop him a line at Hannity@foxnews.com.